“Play by play, inning by inning, you grinded, you grounded out, and you did it together,” Joe Biden told the World Series champion Atlanta Braves yesterday. “You made the playoffs, you beat the Braves— the, the Brewers, and Dodgers, and then you beat the Astros to win it all.” That bungled nonsense was about as good as it got when the Braves visited the White House Monday.

No sooner had the Major League Baseball champs left than White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre opined that it was probably time to have a “conversation” about changing the team’s probably racist name.

“We believe that it’s important to have this conversation, you know, and Native American and indigenous voices, they should be at the center of this conversation,” Jean-Pierre said. “That is something that the president believes, that is something this administration believes, and he has consistently emphasized that all people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect,” she added. “You hear that often from this president. The same is true here. And we should listen to Native American and indigenous people who are the most impacted by this.”

Good grief, where do we begin?

We suppose we should start where we always do with this inane debate about mascots, and we’ll pose it as a question: Why on earth would a team name be intended as a disparagement? If you have ever played a sport in your life, you know that team pride is essential to whatever the game happens to be. You trash-talk the other team, not your own.

Team names can be fun, including animal names (Cardinals) or something that evokes local flare (Blues). You name your team something to help foster pride and toughness — Titans, Warriors, Bruins, or … Braves. You don’t name your team the Semi-Fascists or the White Supremacists.

The Washington Redskins (Commanders) and Cleveland Indians (Guardians) have already succumbed to this nonsensical cancel culture. Apparently, the hip thing in leftist circles is to get rid of the Native Americans and keep the teams.

Which brings us to the “dignity and respect” so woefully lacking in Joe Biden’s White House. This president recently gave one of the least dignified or respectful speeches in American history, angrily deriding vast swaths of the American citizenry as practically evil. And Democrats routinely denigrate white Americans while unfairly discriminating in favor of minorities. It’s called “equity.”

In fact, back to the Atlanta Braves, we celebrated the poetic justice of their World Series victory after what Biden did to them and their city last year. Biden said he’d “strongly support” Major League Baseball’s move to yank the All-Star Game from Atlanta to punish Georgia for its election integrity law. Biden made numerous false claims about that legislation, calling it “Jim Crow on steroids.”

It was an awful decision to so grossly politicize the game and the sport, and it was hypocritical to boot because the game was moved to Denver despite Colorado’s election law being even more stringent than Georgia’s. Ironically, the move to supermajority-white Denver cost Atlanta’s majority-minority population an estimated $100 million. Thanks, Joe Biden. Thanks, Stacey Abrams. Thanks, Raphael Warnock.

Frankly, the only surprising thing here is that the Braves would accept the invitation to the White House after being so disparaged by the president and his party. Several teams declined invitations to Donald Trump’s White House, sometimes over personality disputes specific to the team. Biden never apologized or backed down from what amounted to mean tweets about the team’s state, so maybe the team would have been better off skipping Biden’s photo op that ended up being followed by yet another sanctimonious leftist lecture about supposedly racist team names.

Can we all agree to just play ball?